Common Read Book Club

The goal of the annual SUNY Cortland Common Read program, hosted by the Cultural and Intellectual Climate Committee (CICC), is to bring together the campus community around shared texts, in order to build interdisciplinary connections and spark discussion on a chosen theme. This year's theme is "Air," and our two Common Read texts, chosen in collaboration with the SGA, are Bewilderment: A Novel by Richard Powers, and The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Maté.

The book club is open to all students, staff, and faculty!

Each month, the Book Club will meet to talk about portions of these texts, led in friendly discussion by students from the English Honor Society, Sigma Tau Delta. For our first meeting, we will focus on the opening chapters of Bewilderment (through p 36), and the "Introduction" to The Myth of Normal.

On the CICC website you can find a free PDF of The Myth of Normal, as well as more information about upcoming events and programming around the theme of "Air": https://www2.cortland.edu/committees/cultural-and-intellectual-climate-committee/

Bewilderment: A Novel, by Richard Powers: A heartrending novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory. The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain…With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Maté: By the acclaimed author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing. In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health? Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal” as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. Now Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society—and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. Cowritten with his son Daniel, The Myth of Normal is Maté’s most ambitious and urgent book yet.